Stop and Stare
by dimiserunt eam mane
Summary: "And who are you?" If he were more awake, he probably would have heard shatter of her last shred of confidence. "My name's Kate Beckett…" she bit her lower lip as she stared at him. "You were shot saving my life."


With his pain-laced confession rolling through her mind, Kate fished for her phone and dialled 911 before she could think straight, her hand pressed against the wound in his chest. They needed to come fast, and she explicitly said that, bringing her rank into the airwaves if anyone dared question why they were at this facility when the man in question had been shot.

_Because I love you, Kate_.

It rolled through her mind while he was in surgery and all she was left to do was sit in the waiting room. They couldn't tell her anything, not technically, due to the lack of relationship with the victim – his wild mind aside. However, one nurse kept the details close to her and shared them whenever she could.

They'd called his mother the moment he'd been wheeled through the hospital doors and Martha Rodgers sat across the room, looking very much out of place. Rick's daughter, she assumed, sat beside her. Kate knew the rush of adrenaline that coursed through her veins; she'd been there before – probably about the same age as her too – and remembered every detail because she'd never gotten the end that she'd wanted.

She prayed that Alexis didn't walk out with the same kind of disclosure.

Martha noticed her first, fidgeting nervously as she stared across the room at the nurse, Hailey, as she shared a soft smile. It was hard not to look back at her, feeling Martha's gaze burn into the side of her face. A burly black haired man stepped from behind the two way door and she watched him as he moved closer to Martha and introduced himself as Dr. Joshua Davidson.

"Your son will be fine," she overheard moments later, the volume of everyone around her causing it to be increasingly difficult to focus on one thing at a time. "…cardiac arrest… physical therapy."

She shook her head and waited until he was done addressing the family and then slid out behind him, her badge encased in her palm. Just as he was about to slip back into the back area of the hospital, she grabbed his wrist. "I'm Kate Beckett, Captain of the Homicide Department of the Twelfth Precinct. I was with Mr. Castle when he was shot."

Kate ignored the way his eyes lit up as he checked her out, an appreciative smile on his face. "I see," he drawled and nodded his head lowly. "Well, Captain Beckett, I cannot normally give out patient information without a warrant of some kind… but, because I like you…" he lifted the chart in his hands and slid it to her quietly.

That was the precise moment that she felt her heart crash in her chest. He'd been shot once, the bullet striking the aorta of his heart as it crashed through. It was lodged deep within his chest and he was lucky that the ambulance had come so quick, as Dr. Davidson has so classily written, otherwise the gunshot would have been fatal.

She pulled her hands away from the chart after reading it twice, making sure that there was no grey lining, that there was nothing that could possibly go wrong. He'd gone into cardiac arrest twice while on the table. She placed the chart back into Dr. Davidson's palms and stepped back, thanking him quietly.

When she turned, she was met face-to-face with Martha Rodgers for the second time that week.

* * *

><p>He woke with a headache and blurry eyes and groaned as the light hit his irises and slammed his eyes shut again. The question of where each exactly he was didn't initially get answered with the first opening of his eyes, but it did as he forced them open again and he stared at the ceiling tiles, the smell engulfing his lungs.<p>

Ugh, he was at the hospital.

The question of how he got there, however, was not as easily answered.

He tried to sit up, but pain engulfed his chest and he bent down to see the patch of gauze there. What had happened? Was he shot? Stabbed? Both were possible, he supposed.

"Hey," a soft, angelic voice drifted toward him and he focused on the image in front of him, meeting the smile of a woman. He wondered who she was. She was beautiful. "You're awake."

He grunted in response, the pain engulfing him again as he tried to sit up, successful this time but he slumped against the back wall, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "What happened?" He asked as he caught her gaze, watching the smile fall from her features.

"You…" she trailed off, suddenly hesitant. "You don't remember?"

He shook his head slowly. "The last thing I remember was being at some party with Chelsea and then… now." Rick scrunched his face up, thinking that he must have gotten in some bar fight and then wound up here. That still didn't explain this beautiful woman sitting across from him. "Speaking of… where is she?"

The woman's face fell even more, if that were at all possible. He felt slightly saddened that her beautiful smile had disappeared so quickly in so little words. "She's uhm… I have no idea, your mother and Alexis didn't mention anyone named Chelsea."

"Mother and Alexis were here?" He's dragging on the points she's making and it's altogether confusing but she nodded her head anyway. "And who are you?"

If he were more awake, he probably would have heard shatter of her last shred of confidence.

"My name's Kate Beckett…" she bit her lower lip as she stared at him. "You were shot saving my life."

Shot, huh? The way she put it made him sound like some superhero, like she owed him something so much that she had made friends with his mother and estranged daughter while he was out. His chest puffed with pride but it deflated just as quickly, a shooting pain rolling through him again. Oh, he was definitely shot.

"Did I get drunk and start to try and play cops?" He asked, leaving out the 'again' because this beautiful woman didn't need to know about his past if she wasn't asking about it.

The woman – _Kate_ – hovered as she sunk her teeth into her lower lip again and he watched as the storm brewed in her mind. He wondered how he'd managed to get in the same plain as her. She was much more sophisticated than any woman he'd been around in a long time. Most of the women he had around him now had been like that of his on-again off-again fling Chelsea; women who made their money honestly, but not earnestly.

"You really don't remember?" She asked after a long moment. "You don't remember showing up at my precinct and claiming to know me? Claiming to have a life with me?"

How drunk had he been?

"No." He said simply, slowly. "I'm sorry Kate… uh… Ms. Beckett. I don't remember anything at all."

The smile she pulled across her features then was nothing short of strained but he accepted it, knowing nothing of this woman and why all of a sudden she'd looked as though he'd reached into the burrows of her chest and ripped her heart from its depths.

"Okay," she said softly. "I'm sorry to have bothered you."

Before he could argue, Kate Beckett walked out of the door and out of his life once more.

* * *

><p>His mother told him of the days missing from his memory in great detail, ensuring that she didn't leave anything out. It took him days to recollect his thoughts, to come to terms with why he'd been shot. Even in his drunken days, he couldn't have thought that he would ever try to play noble and push himself in front of a bullet to save someone, be it they were the angel he'd woken up to or not.<p>

Apparently in the missing days, he'd gone quite literally crazy. But Alexis seemed more at ease with him now, even more eased when he'd promised her no more alcohol and no more fooling around. His counter-self had made peace with his daughter and for that, he'd be eternally grateful.

The thought of the woman that saved him crept up on his mind, though, an eternal thought that without her he wouldn't have been saved. On the other hand, without her, he wouldn't have been shot at all.

His resources were thin after all of the years, but he still had enough to research Katherine Beckett and find out more about whom she was. She was a police Captain of the Twelfth Precinct, married to her work and her achievements. Not a lot else was to be explored; she was relatively quiet, her neighbours never knew one way or the other if she was home or not and that was it. Kate Beckett was a proverbial ghost in more way than one.

She didn't come back after that day in the hospital, not to check up on him or find out how he'd been. Although, sometimes he thought that she was on the phone with his mother, but she would always disappear to her room whenever the phone rang, be it business or not.

Eventually, his thoughts of Kate Beckett dissipated and he moved on with his life.

* * *

><p>Conversely, he was always on her mind. His dying confession and the bedside realization that he'd took nothing from the days they'd spent together other than a pounding head and lack of memory of how exactly he'd gotten shot. He didn't remember anything; not one single crazy moment.<p>

So she left him to exist the way he had before and she went back to existing on her own time. Case after case came and went; she filed the paperwork, congratulated her guys for their work and babysat her goddaughter whenever she had the free time.

"You seem distracted," Lanie's voice was impenetrably curious and had been since the moment Kate had come to her that evening, blood staining her clothes and the confession of a whirlwind moment on her lips. "What's on your mind, girl?"

Kate splayed her palm against Isobel's back. She was such a quiet baby and she was thankful for that. The first moment the two had met had been weird and Isobel hadn't liked her godmother at first. Three months and four dozen visits later, she was kind of getting used to the smell of her. Maybe.

"I don't know anymore, Lanie." She confessed quietly. "I have no answers for all of this and that's not even the most infuriating part about it. It's like I see him everywhere and sometimes I think I might be going crazy because he crawled under my skin so fast and burrowed there and now, long after he's moved on and forgotten all about me, I still remember everything like it was some weird dream that actually happened."

Her friend leaned against her palm as she nodded slowly, taking in everything she said with a grain of salt. Sometimes Kate loved her sensibility; other times she just needed to be told that she wasn't crazy, that Richard Castle slipping in and out of her life had some greater meaning than what it had turned out to be.

"Have you thought about calling him?" Lanie said after a moment and Kate shook her head. "I'm not saying you should, because as far as I'm concerned the guy got hopped up on drugs or something, convinced himself that he was in a relationship with you and when he came out of the high, he didn't remember anything."

"Except there was no trace in his system," Kate reminded her softly, rubbing a slow circle on Isobel's back as she began to fuss against her chest. "C'mon, Lanie; I need something. Something that makes this all makes sense."

Lanie paused, teeth dragging across her lower lip as she stared at her friend quietly. "Kate…" she trailed off slowly. "None of this makes sense, we've all come to terms with this… but he's gone now. There's no use worrying about the what-if's. I mean… if I had done that with Javi, I would have never met Brett."

* * *

><p>"Richard, where are you going?" the voice of his mother chased him as he walked to the door and he could hear her heels chasing him. "You're not supposed to go out on your own yet, darling; you remember you got shot, right?" She scrambled to him, the heels making it impossibly difficult. "Take Alexis with you," she said, turning quickly to summon her granddaughter.<p>

"Mother," Richard growled slowly. "I'll be home in an hour or less. I'm just going to get a coffee and fresh air."

"Fresh air?" the idea seemed foreign to her. "Darling, it's February. It's freezing! Fresh air is the last of your worries." She tugged on the sleeve of his coat and tried to remove it from him. "Now, go back and lay down and we'll get you some coffee from here. It's the best money can buy."

He growled again, shaking her grip from his coat. "No," he said simply. "Mother, I can walk on my own, I can go places if I want to. I'm not going to get shot again," he pulled a tight smile. "Promise. I'll be back within the hour."

He opened the door and slid out before she could argue with him, needing space from the loft, from the overcrowding and definitely from the two very persistent women in his life. He loved them both equally, but there was only so much suffocation a man could take before he dove off the deep end.

This might as well be his deep end; walking through the crowded New York streets was much more strenuous than he could have imagined. But he wound up outside his favourite coffee place within twenty minutes and slid inside, breathing in the smell of fresh coffee and sighing. The meds he was on didn't technically allow for caffeine, but one cup wouldn't kill him. (And if it did, he'd die a happy man.)

He slid back out of the coffee shop, his drink in hand and fell chest-to-chest with a woman and stepped back, an apology on his lips as he caught sight of who it was. "Kate…" he trailed off, staring at her for a beat longer before he closed his gaping mouth. "I mean, Captain Beckett, it's nice to see you."

Rick won't mention the forced smile that crossed her features. It shouldn't matter to him, but it does. "Likewise," she said politely after a few moments. "It's good to see you up and walking after what happened."

Her pleasantries said, she moved to walk away from him again, but he grabbed her arm. "You wouldn't want to catch dinner sometime, would you?"

The look of contemplation never reached her features as she shook her head slowly. "No, Mr. Castle, I would not."

She turned away and disappeared into the throngs of people, leaving him with an ache in the forefront of his chest and for once it wasn't due to the wound.

* * *

><p>"Do you remember what case they were working on when uh… when I interfered?" He asked his daughter one night, interrupting her from her studies. She'd come home nearly every weekend since he'd been shot, nearly transferring half a dozen times so they could cut out the cost but he hadn't allowed her to quit her dream.<p>

Alexis pondered for a moment. "It had something to do with this stone… alternate universes or something. I remember you researched a lot about it. You even had this thing printed from a website."

He stood up then, as fast as he could manage, and advanced toward his laptop. He hadn't spent a great deal of time on it and he rarely deleted his history so maybe…

Rick could feel Alexis at his heels and as he sat down, she moved beside him, staring at the screen as he booted it up and brought up the browser. Ten minutes later, he was staring at the screen "he'd" found earlier that year.

"Parallel universe?" Alexis cocked an eyebrow, laughing softly. "You were really crazy for a little while, Dad. It's good to have you back." She gave him a one-armed hug and pressed a kiss against his cheek. "I've got to get back to my homework," she said as she detached and moved out of the room, leaving him to stare at the screen.

There were videos of people who had transferred to different universes where things were vastly different from the world they'd been in. He watched them all with a grain of sand until he scrolled down the page, eyes on the amulet at the bottom. It seemed so familiar but he wasn't sure why.

_Could this be your gateway to another world?_

None of this made sense, no matter how much sense he tried to apply to it. He stared at the amulet for a second longer, ignoring the familiarity and closed the face of the laptop.

His afternoon nap was filled with dreams of him playing cop, dreams of the amulet and how it hadn't been him at all, but an alternate version of himself, with her that day. When he woke up, there was only one place he knew he needed to be: with her.

* * *

><p>"Have you absolutely lost your mind?" She had been yelling at him for quite a while by this point, eyes wide. "You can absolutely not just walk in here and demand to see evidence from a case and you certainly cannot come in here and try to sell me your crazy bullshit!"<p>

"Kate…" he trailed off. "Hear me out."

"Hear _you_ out?" She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, bewildered. "You are a crazy, uncontrolled man, Richard Castle and you are very lucky I don't have you arrested for breaking into my precinct and harassing me."

He dipped his head low. "I remember everything," he said quietly. "And it seems to me like everything revolves around this artefact and I was wondering if it would make a difference, like it would make any of this make sense."

She stared at him, feeling the beats of her heart increase at his confession. She didn't dare if he remembered his confession. She didn't need the answer to that.

"I found this site I had searched during that time… it was about parallel universes and I got to thinking… what if that was the answer? What if it was me from another universe… a me that spent his entire time here trying to get back to his _you_?" He stuttered on his words.

"Mr. Castle…" Kate dragged out, shaking her head. "There's no such thing as parallel universes."

"Wouldn't it make everything make sense?" He interjected. "Detectives Esposito and Ryan told me that I knew so much about them… that I knew so much about you… but I didn't know their names until this morning." He made a face as he stepped closer to her. "It's an answer, Kate. It might not be the one you want, but it's an answer nonetheless. If that man… the one you dealt with was me but not this me…" he shook his head slowly. "I sound insane. It was just… this dream has stuck with me since it happened last night and I can't get over how familiar you seem and how it feels so right to be here with you."

Kate's face contorted and she shook her head slowly. "Mr. Castle," she said softly. "There's no magic artefact that transported an alternate you here to work with me. That was you. I understand the trauma of your shooting has messed with your memories but…"

He stepped forward and captured her lips, the shooting sensation of familiarity rushing through his system. She fought against him for only a moment before she relaxed in his arms. She would not tell him that she'd been thinking about moments like this since he'd taken the bullet for her. Even if they were momentarily crushed when he woke up with no memories of the days they spent together.

He pulled away slowly, forehead pressed against hers. "Tell me you didn't feel anything and I'll… I'll leave you alone. I'll forget about this."

She lifted her head from his and met his eyes, chewing on her lower lip. "Castle…" she trailed off, ignoring the rising sensation of her heartbeat. "I…" she stared at him. "I can't."

* * *

><p>In the end, there would be no explanation; only a theory that made sense. She confessed to him all the things that <em>he'd<em> known about her, even down to the hushed whisper of where her tattoo was he'd whispered in her ear when she'd been at the height of her disbelief.

He'd been enthralled to hear that she had a tattoo at all.

Maybe there wasn't an all powering answer to what had occurred between them that week of November. But they settled easily with the crazy idea that he'd come up with. That there'd been an alternate version of him with her at that time… trying to find his way home to his Kate.

She couldn't believe, sometimes, that she even believed the scenario he played out for her but she found she loved his wild theories, true or not, and fed into the theory of a different Richard Castle bringing them together whenever she could.

She might be absolute mad, but she soon found that she enjoyed the madness that he brought in her life much more than the mundane life that she had set up for herself.

Weeks past; spring became summer and then summer fall. It happened, by accident, that they caught her mother's murderer. It had happened in one messy movement where he'd swept her on her desk and sent her tiny family of elephants flying on the floor. Ten days later, Senator William Bracken would be charged with the murder of Johanna Beckett and others.

Two days later, Rick would buy a new set – similar to the one she'd had, but better. This set had three more elephants: one for him, for his mother and daughter, for her mother, for her father, and for her. Their family.

His daughter moved home around the same time as she moved in and the two, despite their differences, hit it off instantly. Kate became an instant hit with his family, much more prized than his other flings and wives – not that she was his wife yet. She'd opened up so much in the year and a bit they'd spent together; it was hard for even him to believe that she was the same person he'd ran into that cold February day.

Now, those two people were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

"Do you ever think about it?" He asked one day, raising her from the lucidity of sleep. His hands had been all over her for hours, eager to continue what she'd started earlier at his book launch. "Where we'd be if… he hadn't happened?"

She thought about it often, the Rick that had slipped into her life and turned it upside down. He'd confessed once that he loved her, but it hadn't been to her. She realized that now. He'd been saying that to his Kate, wherever she may be. It was still too weird for her to think about.

"I wonder if they're happy," she said thoughtfully, dragging her finger across his cheek. "He seemed so lost when we first met… so lost that I didn't know who he was. So, I hope when he returned home… wherever that might be… she was waiting for him."

"You know… maybe it's the writer in me, but I like to believe that they did return back to each other eventually… just like we did." He grinned, soft and sweet and she rolled her eyes as she pressed her chin against his cheek. "Maybe I'm just meant to be hopelessly in love with you no matter what universe we're in." She snorted her response.

They laid together, legs curled between each other's. Her hair tickled against his chest as she lifted her head, meeting his gaze lazily. His fingers dance across her skin and she traces the bullet wound on his chest in silence.

"Tell me again," he asked, his voice was just above a whisper and she presses the flat edge of her nail against the scar as she heaved a sigh. "Kate…"

"You came to me… except you weren't you, Rick." She toyed with the idea in her head. In all of the time they'd spent together, she hadn't become used to the idea that there'd been an alternate version of him in her life, an alternate version that inevitably drove them together. She wasn't a believer of anything like this; studies and proof aside, the idea was silly. How could one person have multiple identities scattered across various universes? It seemed improbable.

She heaved a breath through her lips, sitting up as she stared down at him. She still recalled the look in _that_ Rick's eyes as he'd begun to die; telling her that he saved her because he _loved_ her. Those words had come too many times to count from her Rick's, but that memory still resided in the forefront of her mind, accompanied by the look of sheer confusion as he'd asked for some woman named Chelsea.

She learned later, much later, that _Chelsea_ was the name of his latest fling. (By accident, of course.)

"You were this entire different person, and you swore up and down that you knew me… and it was exhilarating and confusing and welcoming all at once." Her smile grew and she bit her lip to supress it, trying to focus on the story. She wasn't the writer between them but he always thought she did quite a good job at it either way. "You wormed your way into my life, into the case we were doing and you knew so much… too much. I remember questioning you – sorry, I keep saying _you_ but it wasn't you, not really – and you were hell bent on the fact that you knew me, that we had something more than just a casual acquaintance."

"Well… we certainly do now," Rick's laughter brought on her own and she smacked her mouth against his, mumbling for him to let her finish as she pulled away slowly, peppering another kiss against his mouth for good measure.

"It was… indescribable, Rick. You knew so much about me and you looked at me like the world revolved around my every word and I've never quite felt that loved before." She caught his gaze and watched as it fell, sighing softly to herself. "Well, _he _did. He was obviously very in love with the other-me." She cupped his cheek gently, his five-o-clock shadow scratching against the palm of her hand. "He put his life on the line for me, for a woman that wasn't his, because even in this universe he couldn't imagine something as such; the repercussions too much for him to bear, I guess." She shrugged one shoulder and ducked her head too, her hair falling around her head like a curtain, clasping them both inside its depths.

"And then you woke up," She continued after a moment. "And you didn't know who I was."

She saw it then, the flicker of hurt that crossed his features and wondered for a moment if it mirrored in hers. Meeting that Rick had been a change of perspective. But meeting her Rick… it changed her life.

"Honey," she shook her head and he laughed, placing a wet kiss against her cheek as she leaned closer to him. "My world revolves around you, too."

She slapped his chest, laughing as he pressed kiss after kiss against the hollow of her throat, moving toward another area altogether. "Don't be a sap," she laughed and wrinkled her nose. "You just hit number one on the best seller list again, Mr. Castle, what a shame it would be if it got out that you were using clichés…"

She was beneath him before she could blink and she looked up to meet his dark blue-black eyes, full of ferocity and hunger. "Well…" he trailed off, moving between her thighs. She rubbed her ankle against his backside as he pressed against into her, mouth hovering mere inches above hers. "I suppose I'll have to ask the source for some special privileges… or convince her to keep that to herself."

A wicked smile crossed Kate's features and she pressed her hips to his, biting her lip as the hiss slipped from his lips. "In that case," she breathed, grinning softly. "Convince away…"

* * *

><p>AN: I can't even explain this... or what this was. I was thinking about the AU!world where Kate and Rick had been slightly pushed together because of RC's actions and then this happened. I hope those of you who are still reading this enjoyed the read either way. Thank you all for reading it, either way.


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